Month: November 2009

Kevin: This a bad news/good news analysis of the US newpaper industry. Banks and other financial firms have taken a controlling interest in dozens of newspapers including some major tltles. The bad news is that newspaper ad revenue is set to bring in $27bn this year, which is $22bn less than three years ago. Circulation is falling. The report says that banks may bring in 'new blood', although there is little detail in this story about what that might be.

Oh, I love a bit of infoporn and this is a truly glorious visualisation of the decline of the British, Spanish, French and Portuguese maritime empires by Pedro Cruz. (For a bigger version, pop along to Vimeo.)

The data refers to the evolution of the top 4 maritime empires of the XIX and XX centuries by extent. I chose the maritime empires because of their more abrupt and obtuse evolution as the visual emphasis is on their decline. The first idea to represent a territory independence was a mitosis like split — it’s harder to implement than it looks. Each shape tends to retain an area that’s directly proportional to the extent of the occupied territory on a specific year. The datasource is mostly our beloved wikipedia. The split of a territory is often the result of an extent process and it had to be visualized on a specific year. So I chose to pick the dates where it was perceived a de facto independence (e.g. the most of independence declarations prior to the new state’s recognition). Dominions of an empire, were considered part of that empire and thus not independent.

The wonderful thing about these sorts of projects is that they turn otherwise dry information into fascinating social objects.

Kevin: "From this month the News International-owned title’s MySun community gives users the ability to make friends with each other, add comments to friends’ profile pages and send private messages. And, in a similar vein to Facebook, users can upload pictures and add comments to articles and upload videos."

Kevin: Kristine has a great roundup of some of the views in Norway of whether news organisations should create rules for their staff about social media use. Great quote to kick it all off: "'The home alone party is over, now the adults are back and they want rules,' said Jan Omdahl, internet and technology commentator for Norwegian tabloid Dagbladet. He said Dagbladet’s journalists had been playing around with social media from an early stage, but now the media executives had entered the arena, demanding rules."
This discussion is happening in news organisations across Europe and United States. Kristine has done a great job of reporting the state of the disussion in Norway.

Kevin: Mike Butcher adds more detail on Microsoft's discussion with Rupert Murdoch's News International about 'de-indexing' their content from Google and being paid by Microsoft as an exclusive search provider on Bing. The most interesting tidbit: "Money talks, obviously, and we understand that the payments could be a) part in revenue share from advertising on Bing b) the inclusion of news partners in adverts for Bing. In other words, you’d start to see ads with “You’ll only find The Wall Street Journal on Bing.com” etc."

Kevin: Brian Stelter reports: "A consortium of magazine publishers including Time Inc. and Condé Nast plan to jointly build an online newsstand for publications in multiple digital formats, according to people with knowledge of the plans." It's a so-called iTunes of news. I wonder if this will follow the eMag model that Axel Springer is following in Germany with additional digital content beyond

Kevin: Jay Rosen is compiling a list of sources of subsidy in the production of news. It's a brilliant list that looks in great and growing detail at revenue sources for news production. It is well work bookmarking and checking as Jay and others add to it.

Kevin: Investor and tech watcher Fred Wilson points a new technology from the developer of audioscrobbler, the technology underpinning last.fm. Richard Jones has now released a technology called Playdar. "Playdar is a "music content resolver" platform. You put the Playdar software on all the machines you have with music on them. And then Playdar makes it so that you can play your music via the web whenever and wherever you want."
Open platforms and ecosystems are powerful and the music web needs more of them. I am excited to see where Playdar goes. I'll be following it closely and if you are into web music, you should too."

Kevin: An excellent post with some great data and analysis from Alison Gow, Executive Editor, digital, for the Liverpool Echo and Liverpool Daily Post. She takes newspaper to task for claims that 'nobody else scrutinises our public bodies'. She says that the average local newspaper isn't a regular visitor to magistrates courts in the UK. She is working with the Press Association to look at new models of producing local accountability journalism, and she has the numbers to prove it. She also answers the charge from a commenter that newspapers local council and courts coverage is dominated by recycled press releases. Not so. It's great to see this kind of blogging and research going on from within journalism. It's inspired me to do more of it.

Kevin: My colleague Patrick Smith, writing for PaidContent, has a brilliant post on economic models that work online. Offline models transfer imperfectly to the internet. It makes sense because geographical isolation and the natural monopolies they grant aren't in operation. Content is both plentiful and searchable, and the high capital distribution economics of broadcast and print media aren't in play.
Patrick offers alternatives and makes a succinct but compelling case. Engagement, not just marketing to drive page views, and rewards for loyalty could address inadequacies in the existing digital models for news organisations.

I love Merlin Mann’s way of thinking about productivity, the way that we work and our relationship with our working life. This is a great talk that he gave last year about, yes, Time & Attention. Merlin talks about our relationship to email, the usefulness of re-negotiation, and our need to recognise that our time and attention are scarce resources that we should prize more highly.

What is it that makes our inbox such an enticing place that we spend hours there every day? It’s a question that fascinates me, mainly because I have such an uncomfortable relationship with email. I get lots of it, am often slow to respond and frequently end up feeling guilty because my email has got the best of me.

It’s not just about physical needs such as food, or sex, but also about abstract concepts. Dopamine makes us curious about ideas and fuels our searching for information. The latest research shows that it is the opoid system (separate from dopamine) that makes us feel pleasure.

Wanting vs. liking – According to Kent Berridge, these two systems, the “wanting” (dopamine) and the “liking” (opoid) are complementary. The wanting system propels us to action and the liking system makes us feel satisfied and therefore pause our seeking. If our seeking isn’t turned off at least for a little while, then we start to run in an endless loop. The latest research shows that the dopamine system is stronger than the opoid system. We seek more than we are satisfied (back to evolution… seeking is more likely to keep us alive than sitting around in a satisfied stupor).

A dopamine induced loop – With the internet, twitter, and texting we now have almost instant gratification of our desire to seek. Want to talk to someone right away? Send a text and they respond in a few seconds. Want to look up some information? Just type it into google. What to see what your friends are up to? Go to twitter or facebook. We get into a dopamine induced loop… dopamine starts us seeking, then we get rewarded for the seeking which makes us seek more. It becomes harder and harder to stop looking at email, stop texting, stop checking our cell phones to see if we have a message or a new text.

This sheds much needed light on why we spend so much time checking for new email only to then not deal with it when it has arrived, but there is more to the email problem than dopamine.

There are cultural problems around the use of email as a proxy for productivity; huge email loads being worn as a badge of honour by people who like to equate their inbox martyrdom with a commitment to work; and defensive emailing by people who feel so scared or insecure that they CC everyone. These issues around the sending of mail need to be tackled, probably before we try to tackle our dopamine-fueled inbox obsession.

But as Weinschenk points out, tools like Twitter are just as likely to “send our dopamine system raging”.

So if social media is as addictive as email, isn’t it pointless to try to replace one with the other? I don’t think so, no, because there’s more to it than trying to reduce inbox faffing, as important as that is. It’s also about improving sharing, findability, archiving, collaboration, conversation, staff relationships, morale and efficiency. These benefits, in my opinion, outweigh the potential flaws in the new tools.

We do need to be aware that social media isn’t without its problems, but understanding the fundamental biological and psychological processes that shape the way we interact with technology will help us to solve those problems. I look forward to watching and maybe even participating in the emerging field of technopsychology.

One of the most important stages in building a relationship with a new client is, in my opinion, requirements gathering. Partly this happens even before a deal is struck, because consultants need to know top level requirements before they can put together a proposal.

Once work begins there’s usually a more formal and detailed requirements gathering phase during which one learns about the client as much through observation as direct questioning. This period of learning is crucial. To do the job well, one must understand how one’s client thinks, how they work, what they are expecting, what they know, not to mention figuring out what the client thinks they want and what they actually need.

This is at odds with the common procurement procedure of having multiple companies/consultants tendering to fulfil an already detailed brief. I came across one of these briefs just the other day and it was a stark reminder of how the tender process fails horribly when the client doesn’t understand what it is they are asking for.

The tender in question was very detailed: seven pages of background, contract objectives and deliverables, specifications, timetables and milestones, selection criteria and more. But whilst it’s great to see that they’d put so much thought into it, their basic premise was so deeply flawed that I can only imagine two types of people who would tender for the job as described: a naïf with no real understanding of social media, or someone with flexible ethics.

The tender process is setting the project up to fail. A responsible consultant would respond to the tender with a counterproposal, suggesting alternative avenues of exploration that would be more fruitful and constructive. I fear, however, that once a project is at tender stage, so much work has gone into it and so many colours nailed to its mast that it becomes politically difficult to turn the ship around.

The sad thing is, when the project fails it will be social media that is blamed, not the project’s central concept. And had the organisation in question spent a little bit of money up front working with someone who knows their onions, they could have saved a lot of money in the long run. Penny wise, pound foolish.

Kevin: Consumer electronics and television is starting to look a like the computer-driven home media centres that have been around for a few years. Roku and XBMC port Boxee are going head-to-head, but we're also starting to see connected televisions with their own applications. The battle for the living room is going to get interesting.

Kevin: I have to say that I'm still struggling with Wave. I find the interface inscrutable, and apart from group working on a project or story, I'm still looking for useful applications that are better than what I have now.
However, Leah Betancourt at Mashable looks at ways that news organisations are already using Wave, including a virtual 'town hall' or 'town square' by the Austin (Texas) American-Statesman and as a content planning tool. I can see how the latter works. As I said, I can see how it might be good for collaboration, especially with either staff outside the newsroom.

Kevin: Kara Swisher at All Things D (a Wall Street Journal Joint) is throwing cold water that Microsoft might pay publishers for content exclusive to Bing. "While it might be a dream of publishers–hard hit by the digital tsunami and blaming Google for the crisis–Microsoft is not likely to fork over the big bucks they’d need for exclusive indexing of their content." She quotes a source saying: "…it's not going to be bank for publishers".

Kevin: A thorough rundown of changes coming up at Facebook. This is especially useful for developers creating applications for Facebook and any publisher who is using Facebook to help promote their content and engage with their audiences.

Kevin: Pete Cashmore says that Rupert Murdoch is scoring an own goal on his attacks on Google. "News Corp is merrily making itself irrelevant to web consumers, while continuing to use Google as its punch bag rather than addressing the radical transition of media into the online world."

Kevin: This is an introduction for a video interview with Michael Rosenblum about local television news in the US. "Michael Rosenblum believes local television news as we've known it for decades is dead. News directors, station managers and broadcast group owners "just don't know it yet."

Rosenblum believes the only way to make the video storytelling model work–profitably–is to cut costs far closer to the bone than any old media company's going to be willing or able to do."

Kevin: Fascinating post by Steve Buttry and interesting comments about the need for 'mobile-first' news strategies. Steve writes: "News organizations are belatedly, reluctantly and often awkwardly pursuing “web-first” strategies. As we fight these web battles, I am increasingly coming to believe that “web first” is what the military would call fighting the last war. News organizations need a mobile-first strategy."

Kevin: Ben Metcalfe (a friend of ours) has launched a new venture called Plato's Forms. Ben lays out the problem: "Well, the problem space we are addressing is the perpetuation of of miss-information and inaccurate information within the online news environment. " This is coming from a PR/product perspective rather than a news and information perspective.

I think about this from a slightly different perspective. It's pretty easy for inaccurate information to perpetuate through the news system (there is increasingly less distance between online and print). We often quote other sources (according to the AP, BBC, Reuters.) At any rate, interesting project with concepts that have other application.

Searching for the perfect Twitter tool is a bit like searching for Shangri-La: You know it’s out there somewhere and you can find it if you just search hard enough.

I was a Twhirl addict for a long time, but recently switched to Tweetie as Twhirl was hammering my Mac’s processors a bit too much. Tweetie is more compact and has a better user interface, but there are things that it doesn’t do that Twhirl did.

Such is the way of Twitter clients. If you pooled all the features of all Twitter clients, you’d have all you need to create a spec for the perfect client, but no single client fits that bill yet.

When it comes to managing Twitter accounts in a business context, Tweetdeck is many people’s favourite, if only because it lets you save keyword searches. If you’re monitoring Twitter for mentions of your company, that’s invaluable functionality. But still has its drawbacks, including awful design and excessive demands on screen real estate.

CoTweet is a newcomer to the market, but already has an impressive feature set. Because it’s a web app rather than a local client, multiple people can manage multiple accounts. It also allows you to assign Tweets to a colleagues for follow-up action, with automatic email assignment notifications, and to make notes on individual Tweeters. That should help companies monitoring Twitter for customer care purposes make sure Tweets don’t fall between the cracks.

Other cute features include scheduled tweets and inline access to Bit.ly’s shortened URL stats so you can see how many people have clicked on a any given Bit.ly link.

CoTweet does need a bit of love and attention where usability is concerned, though. The interface is a bit confusing and, just like every other Twitter client, there are things that it could be doing but isn’t. I particularly like Tweetie’s conversation view, where when you click on a Tweet it will show you all the previous Tweets in that exchange, and I can imagine that might be useful for CoTweet users too.

Overall, though, CoTweet shows promise and provides a very different view of Twitter than most other clients. Definitely one to watch.